Posted by George Huhn on Sun, Jun 27, 2010 @ 03:38 PM
The power of your network isn't just in its size. And it isn't just in whom you know or in whom they know. The power of your network to change the world may come from just introducing two people in it to each other.
In 1935, my grandmother, Henrietta B. Seiberling, was experiencing some hard times. Separated from her husband and living in a
small gatehouse in Akron, Ohio with her three children, she had been attending meetings of the Oxford Group, then a movement that was trying, in her words, "to recapture the power of first Century Christianity in the modern world."
One of the group members was Dr. Bob Smith, who was an alcoholic but didn't think anybody knew about it. So my grandmother arranged for a small meeting of a few people where she hoped people would share deeply about their own shortcomings and victories more than they did in the larger meetings. She later said:
"I waited and thought, Will Bob say something? Sure enough, in that deep, serious tone of his, he said, 'Well, you good people have all shared things that I am sure were very costly to you, and I am going to tell you something which may cost me my profession. I am a silent drinker, and I can't stop.'"
My grandmother knew nothing about alcoholism, but the next day she called Bob and told him to come over to her house for "a guidance." When he arrived, she told him that, to his disappointment, "he mustn't touch one drop of alcohol."
In her words:
"He said, 'Henrietta, I don't understand it. Nobody understands it.' Now that was the state of the world when we were beginning. He said, 'Some doctor had written a book about it, but he doesn't understand it. I don't like the stuff. I don't want to drink.' I said, 'Well, Bob, that is what I have been guided about.' And that was the beginning of our meetings, long before Bill ever came."
Months later an alcoholic named Bill Wilson arrived in Akron from New York to complete a business deal. The deal fell through, and Bill was left with nothing but a few dollars in his pocket, not even enough to pay for his hotel room. Even though he hadn't had a drink in 5 months, he looked into a bar and thought, "Well, I'll just go in there and get drunk and forget it all, and that will be the end of it."
But instead, he looked in a ministers directory and picked a name at random, a man named Tunks. He called Dr. Tunks and he gave him a list of names to call, including a good friend of my grandmother, Norman Sheppard. Norman knew what my grandmother was trying to do for Bob, so he suggested that he call her. Down to his last nickel, that's exactly what he did, and he told her, "I'm from the Oxford Group and I'm a Rum Hound from New York."
So she got Bob and Bill together at her house the next day, just thinking that they each might benefit from talking with each other. Bob had promised his wife he would only stay for 15 minutes, but he end up staying the whole day with Bill, and they shared their stories with each other. And while each had thought that telling their stories was going to be what helped them, what they found was that listening to each other's story was even more helpful. And seeds of Alcoholics Anonymous were planted.
Later, Bill Wilson, or Bill W. as he came to be known, talked about some of the precepts that developed into the famous "12 Steps" of Alcoholics Anonymous:
"We admitted we were licked.
We got honest with ourselves.
We talked it over with another person.
We made amends to those we had harmed.
We tried to carry this message to others with no thought of reward.
We prayed to whatever God we thought there was."
Now, my grandmother wasn't trying to start an organization to help alcoholics. At the time, she really didn't understand what alcoholism was – nobody really did. She was just trying to help a friend never touch another drop of alcohol. But she put two people together and then worked with them to start an organization that has helped millions of people around the world.
Not for money. Not for fame. Just to help a friend.
In the new economy world where being heard through "Social Media", Twittering, and accumulating Facebook "friends" is all the rage, just remember my grandmother and never forget the magic that can happen when two people simply meet, face-to-face, and honestly listen to each other.
Posted by George Huhn on Tue, May 25, 2010 @ 12:19 PM
I was talking with a friend of mine, Dr. Richard Flanagan, a psychologist and co-author of the book The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development into Business Results, about his recent election to a non-profit Board of Trustees. Our discussion quickly turned to the number of new acronyms that he had heard being bandied about in his first meeting.
"I know what you mean," I said. "I often have meetings with clients where the acronym flow becomes too fast to follow."
So Richard told me how he solves that problem: he raises his hand and says that he is sorry that he can't understand because he is "dysacronymic."
"Most people at first express their sympathy, even though they don't know what 'dysacronymic' means."
So he explains:
"I coined the term "Dysacronymic" to mean confused by or unable to understand acronyms, an impairment in the ability to understand or interpret acronyms. I use the term especially in new settings where internal acronyms are bandied about: any company, government agency, or technology group being prime offenders, but all human systems seem to be afflicted with shortcuts assumed to be known and understood by all. I guess we also need a diagnostic term and description for human systems that are overburdened or blessed with many acronyms - maybe hyper-acronymic systems!"
"After I use it I always confess to making up the term and meaning no offense and then request acronym interpretation or explanation. Very often others express gratitude for the intervention - even insiders sometimes don't know the meanings but don't want to look bad by asking. I have found that sometimes the acronym users themselves can't explain them very well and have often forgotten the exact terms that the letters stand for."
The project management and project portfolio management fields are loaded with acronyms; this page from Project Management Knowledge lists 87 project management related acronyms. And, of course, many acronyms have multiple meanings. Our Data Machines website gets hits from people searching for information about "parts per million" as it shares the same acronym as "project portfolio management" (PPM).
Richard told me that he is planning to write up a "clinical" description that "will follow the DSM-IV diagnostic descriptions model." For those of you like Richard and me, who are dysacronymic, DSM is the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" of the American Psychiatric Association."
So, are you dysacronymic, too? If you are, thanks to Dr. Flanagan, at least now we'll have a clinical diagnostic model to point to that explains our affliction.
But does anybody have any cures?
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Posted by George Huhn on Sat, Dec 05, 2009 @ 03:54 PM
In spite of the fact that counting, numbers, and games of chance have been around for millenniums, it wasn't until the middle of the 17th century when three Frenchmen, Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat, and Chevalier de Méré, developed the foundations for modern probability theory.
So even though probability theory seems obvious to us today, it was relatively late in human history that it was developed. With that in mind, I have been enjoying teaching some of the concepts of probability to my 9-year old son using a fun little book called
Do You Wanna Bet?: Your Chance to Find Out About Probability By Jean Cushman and Martha Weston. It is an entertaining story of two boys, Danny and Brian, discovering the impact of probability in their everyday experiences and developing a practical understanding of how to apply these concepts to others.
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." Probability is one of those great ideas that can stretch a person's mind, particularly a child's. Once a child has learned the basic concepts of arithmetic, it is probably never too early begin teaching these great ideas, and this book is a wonderful way to start.
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® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
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Posted by George Huhn on Tue, Nov 17, 2009 @ 12:36 PM
I’ve also been toying for the last several years with the idea of developing a turn-key module for senior undergraduates or graduate business students in project portfolio management and/or decision analysis using Optsee®. It would be similar to an assignment I had at Wharton in an R&D Management class taught by Professor Earnest Gilmont, except that we didn't use any software or decision analysis tools.
Each student would get a copy of Optsee® that is pre-loaded with an unoptimized portfolio of projects with pre-assigned attributes (such as rewards, costs, resources, risks, etc.) and sets of constraints created for a hypothetical company. The students would form teams, and each team would be assigned to take their set of projects and develop an optimized portfolio that was targeted for different strategic goals. For example:
- one team would develop a portfolio designed to make the company attractive for being acquired
- one team would develop a portfolio designed for implementing an outsourcing strategy
- one team would develop a portfolio to maximize short-term gain
- one team would develop a portfolio to maximize long-term sustainability
Each team would then put together a presentation and/or a paper presenting their portfolio and how they came to agree on it. This would require the team to agree on what attributes to use, the shapes of the attribute curves, the attribute weights, and what constraints they would need to apply.
I think that this could all be put into a nice educational package that would give students an excellent understanding of developing strategic project portfolios based on business goals through their own experiences and by seeing the different portfolios developed by their classmates. It would also give them a fundamental understanding and appreciation of multi-criteria or multiattribute decision analysis, prioritization using Monte Carlo simulations, and optimization against multiple constraints.
So I am curious. How did you learn about Project Portfolio Management? And if you're a professor, how do you teach it?
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.